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Blogs 'n' Stuff on SustainLane US City Rankings

(c) Copyright 2007 SustainLane

Warren Karlenzig works at SustainLane. He is not responsible for any user-generated Content or links that show up on his blog. Also, what he says represents SustainLane, and he is protected by SustainLane.

What's troubling is the negative impact these cities will have on the best efforts of urban centers to green their communities.

Located in more than 25 metro areas in the US, so-called boomburbs have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled in size since the 1970s or 1980s, with metros such as Phoenix having as much 42 percent of its total population residing in these new clusters.

Photo source: Wikipedia

While the SustainLane US City Rankings of the largest 50 US cities included only two of these so-called Boomburbs--Mesa, Arizona and Arlington, Texas--these and other cities such as North Las Vegas, Nevada; Hialeah, Florida; Peoria, Arizona; and Chesapeake, Virginia will be truly pushing the limit in impacting smart growth planning approaches for water, natural resources, air quality and traffic impacts.

The problem is many of these boomburbs lack city planning, and rely instead on housing developers for master plans, which may or may not be cobbled together to form the basis for transportation and resource planning.

Worse, say authors Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy, boomburbs are quickly leapfrogging into cheaper agricultural land beyond metro cities, with even newer "mini boomburbs" that push into "increasingly remote locations and use legislation intended to promote rural economic growth to steal businesses from older, more developed suburbs."

Examples are provided of cities such as Frisco, Texas, which is outside Dallas-Forth Worth, poaching business from older Texas boomburbs such as Plano and Irvine.

"Boomberbs are truly 'driving cities'," say the authors. "Not only is public transit use low, but also average travel time to work is high." It's not surprising that Arlington, Texas (pop. 360,000), was the only city in the SustainLane US City Rankings to have 0 percent of its population commuting on public transit or biking to work.

The authors report on "freeway exit economies," where a community's economic growth potential is measured by the number of freeway exits and miles of freeway-facing frontage road it has. That's so it can pencil out how much land it can develop with low-slung strip malls, big-box retailers, corporate campuses and massive residential housing projects.

Boomburbs never mentions the environmental impacts boomburbs foist upon neighboring communities, regions and states (the book and supporting study were funded by the Fannie Mae Foundation).

But there is one glimmer of hope: most mayors and city councils of boomburbs are pursuing light rail as a solution to the congestion, air pollution, inconvenience and the resulting lack of prestige these mushrooming "driving cities" and their 10 million inhabitants are experiencing.

July 11, 2007

Fresno, California sits at the south end of one of the sunniest and hottest valleys in North America, the San Joaquin. The San Joaquin Air District is also one of the most polluted in the nation, with asthma rates many times higher than the rest of the nation and numerous air quality action days every summer causing significant health and business impacts.

Upon this tableau, the city of about a half million residents along with 11 surrounding communities and two counties announced last week they would together be developing the largest solar facility in the world. It will be more than seven times the size of the earth’s largest solar energy farm, now in Germany.

“We’re so excited about what community choice can do for us,” said Dave Orth, Manager of KRCD.

Community choice allows a city, county or group of communities such as the KRCD to band together to build and produce their own energy and then transmit that over lines owned by public or investor-owned utilities. In the case of the KRCD and other California communities following in its path, the goal is to control development of new energy sources, particularly renewables, which can be solar, wind, biomass or other non-polluting technologies.